People You May Know

One Yellow Rabbit’s Mac roots go back deep, says Blake Brooker. So it only makes sense that the creative spark that led to their latest creation came from a piece of Apple software loaded on every Mac. OYR’s People You May Know is almost a puppet show. The actors project distorted Photo Booth caricatures of themselves to portray their multiple characters. Brooker sat down with Jon Roe to talk about OYR’s High Performance Rodeo offering.

Has your interpretation of it changed since you last rehearsed it in October? It’s almost like marination, a je ne sais quoi factor happens. Sometimes you have a steak you just get and cook, that’s one thing, but if it’s been treated in a certain way and rested in something, you can taste something different or you feel something different. This is kind of a marination that takes place if you rehearse earlier. It sits inside the actor’s brain and body longer and finds a home there, a little more comfort within the performer.

Are you a PC or a Mac guy? Always been a Mac guy. That’s where I started, but I get there’s some good things to either one of them. We were Mac around here ever since the beginning. We had one Mac for the whole office way back in the day. As a matter of fact, the first Mac we ever encountered (belonged to) a friend of the company, who worked at an oil company a couple buildings over, and we’d go in there to type up scripts on one of those original personal Apples. Those ones that fit into a box, those big square ones.

When was this? This was—oh, God—that would’ve been ’90? ’92? ’93? Something like that. I think this was early ’90s when they first came out. It might’ve been late ’80s. Time flies.

Had you played around with the Photo Booth software before this idea was brought to you by the actors (Denise Clarke, Andy Curtis and David Rhymer)? Not other than having it on the panel on the bottom or the side of your computer. It was just there. I had one of those old white iBooks, and never even thought of it. When the actors played around with these things, I could see that there was potential there. We’ve almost been like mad scientists playing with this in our backyard. It was quite technical and physical in trying to get the angles right; where will you set these up? How will they work? And will they work? All these questions are still hanging in the air.

Are these things you’ve worked out in rehearsal? When you do a puppet show, those guys go, can these puppets carry the interest? Now, in this instance, you have the actors sitting out so you can watch them. So in a way it’s like watching them do a radio play, but there’s a visual element to it, too.

People You May Know: Presented by One Yellow Rabbit. Until Saturday, Feb. 2 at the Big Secret Theatre, Epcor Centre. 7:30 p.m. $35. 403-294-9494, hprodeo.ca.

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